Flanders today
arts
february 27, 2013
The Filth Element
Offscreen takes in the trash, with a programme of exploitation and special guest John Waters Ian Mundell
C
ult director John Waters is guest of honour at the Offscreen film festival this year, which means that trash will be king and camp will be queen. Or possibly the other way around, since Waters is nothing if not contrary. With films such as Pink Flamingos and Polyester, Waters’ cinema is a
of the time. Waters wanted to annoy the counterculture as much as the establishment, arguing that since it was liberals who came to see his movies, these were the people whose goat you had to get. Hence the glorification of violence, the ultimate hippy taboo, in films such as Multiple Maniacs (1970).
The Filthiest Person Alive
celebration of the outsider, and the further out, the better. “Basically, all my films are about people who are happy with their lunacy on one side and people who are bitter on the other side, and the good guys always win,” he said in a 1988 interview. This explains much of the American director’s appeal: His films may be outrageous and disgusting, but they are joyous rather than exploitative. Waters (pictured above) started making films in the mid-1960s, inspired by underground directors such as Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol and the Kuchar brothers, whose work he had seen in New York City. Back home in the much-less-trendy Baltimore, he put his friends in front of the camera – fellow suburban rejects who aspired to be stars. Foremost among these was Glenn Milstead, whose Jayne Mansfieldinspired drag persona Divine became central to Waters’ films. Divine was the perfect Waters star, challenging conventional audiences but also, it is said, raising hackles in the drag scene
Offscreen’s retrospective skips this early work and begins with Pink Flamingos (1972), the tale of Divine’s quest to defend her reputation as The Filthiest Person Alive. All Waters’ subsequent features get an outing, including an Oderama screening of Polyester (1981), with scratch-andsniff cards provided to enhance the viewing experience. Waters’ films became less wilfully offensive and more nostalgic with Hairspray (1988), the tale of a plump girl who dreams of winning a TV dance contest in the early 1960s. The result was commercial success and acceptance by the establishment, something the director greeted with baffled good grace. Later films such as Cry-Baby (1990) and Pecker (1998) continued the trend, although his most recent, A Dirty Shame (2004), returned to a trashier aesthetic. You can hear Waters’ version of events in the one-man show This Filthy World at Bozar on 9 March. Topics include his childhood in Baltimore, his fascination with true crime, exploitation films, fashion lunacy, Catholicism, sexual deviancy and why he always admired the Wicked Witch of the West more than Dorothy.
Trash conference For a more serious view of his place in camp and trash cinema, there
is an academic conference on 8 March. “Camp and trash are related aesthetics,” the festival programme argues. “Camp is full of irony, dandified posing and nostalgia, while trash is a celebration of the cheap, offensive and disposable. Both aesthetics collided in the early films of John Waters. He thoroughly understood ‘high camp’ and appreciated the Hollywood melodramas by Douglas Sirk or musicals such as The Girl Can’t Help It. But he also wallowed in low camp, which is within spitting distance of trash.” The Girl Can’t Help It (starring Jayne Mansfield, if you want to compare and contrast with Divine) appears in the accompanying film programme, along with “classics” such as Russ Meyer’s Supervixens, Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast, Mike Hodges’ Flash Gordon and Ed Wood Jr’s Glen or Glenda. Waters also selects a handful of his personal favourites, such as terrible Tennessee Williams rip-off Two Moon Junction and the teasingly titled Kitten With A Whip.
Gangster, erotic and horror Aside from camp and trash, Offscreen this year offers a retrospective of films by veteran horror director José Ramón Larraz, who is due to attend, and a celebration of Japanese gangster, pulp and erotic films produced by Nikkatsu Studio during the 1960s and 1970s. A programme of short films showcases Flemish talent, including the Oscarnominated Death of a Shadow, staring Matthias Schoenaerts, and the downright weird Perfect Drug. American animator Martha Colburn presents a selection of her short films, and The Pastorz will provide a live soundtrack for Rudderless by
John Waters’ Female Trouble is a viewing experience like no other
Igor and Ivan Buharov. The festival opens with the highly regarded British film Berberian Sound Studio, about a sound engineer working on an Italian horror film in the 1970s who finds life and art mixing to a disturbing degree. Director Peter Strickland will attend. Other unreleased films due to screen include Room 237, a
documentary about people obsessed with The Shining, and weird fiction such as Errors of the Human Body and Sadourni’s Butterflies. Most have English subtitles. If you can’t make it to Brussels, Offscreen will be on tour throughout March, bringing selected films to Cinema Zuid in Antwerp, BUDA in Kortrijk and Japan Square in Ghent.
6-24 March Cinema Nova and other venves across Brussels and Flanders
www.offscreen.be
Creating the cultural connection Fast Forward revives Als ik jou, poetry-theatre for learners of Dutch Katy Desmond
B
eyond the endless prepositions, the inscrutable “de” and “het” dilemmas and the unfathomable “dt” errors, Dutch teacher Peter Schoenaerts noticed that his students were confronting an extra challenge as language learners: a lack of art. “Theatre was too difficult, movies were usually spoken in dialect. There was not much to do for them as far as culture,” he explains. In other words, where culture was concerned, students’ tongues were all tied up. In 2001, this prompted Schoenaerts to found Fast Forward, a non-profit theatre group that stages performances aimed at students of Dutch, as a way to motivate them, stimulating their learning by getting them more deeply involved in the culture. The company’s latest production, Als ik jou, which is touring Flanders now and also makes stops in Spain and Germany, is born out of this same drive to connect Dutch learners with the
culture of the language, this time using poetry. The piece compiles some 25 works by famous Dutch and Flemish writers, taking them off the page and putting them on the stage with the help of performers Schoenaerts, Jorka Decroubele and Brecht Vanmeirhaeghe. The production, now in its second edition, was created in 2009 to fill what Schoenaerts viewed as a gap in the Dutch-language education syllabus. “Textbooks for students are often very functional, like going shopping or to the doctor. I had this idea to try to do something with literature,” he explains. Als ik jou exposes students to the works of literary giants both old and new, like Annie MG Schmidt and Bart Moeyaert and the late Herman De Coninck and Hugo Claus. The result is an entertaining, moving and educational piece of theatre. “For people to stay motivated, I think it’s important they feel a kind of emotional
challenging for students just starting out in Dutch, Als ik jou is billed as being for Dutch learners of every level. “Part of poetry,” explains Schoenaerts, “is not that you understand all the words, but that you hear the feeling, the rhythm. I think they get the message; they get what the poem wants to say even if they don’t get every word.” From left: Jorka Decroubele, Peter Schoenaerts and Brecht Vanmeirhaeghe in Als ik jou
connection to the language,” Schoenaerts says. “We make them laugh, and we try to touch them, to make them feel emotional sometimes. It gives them the impression that they do belong, that they do have an understanding of the culture and that language is more than just a functional thing that they need to get the job or buy a loaf of bread.” Although some of the poems might be quite
5 March, 20.00 Als ik jou GC De Lijsterbest Lijsterbessenbomenlaan 6, Kraainem for more dates, see website
www.fast-forward.be
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